Blog

Search form

The One Ingredient PR Buster

This article is an adaptation of an article posted on Superman Herbsand written by nutrition coach, Zack Zeller. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. Hang in there and at the end there is a coupon to save 20% on Pure Clean Powder.

Before NO2 explode and creatine supplements filled the shelves of supplement stores and online BodyBuilding Forums, great athletes throughout time relied on regular old foods that grew straight out of the ground. Much of the market boasts about mega nutrients and superfoods backed by mountains of research.

But is that right?

Do you have to rely on synthetic chemicals and Frankenfood concoctions to boost your performance?

Sadly, the most ordinary foods are often overlooked for their ability to pack a punch your performance. Let’s take beets for example.

When was the last time you ate a beet?

Beets fed millions of Russians in economic turmoil throughout the years, but there’s a hidden benefit to them as well....

Unfortunately, the Big Beet is not as influential as the marketers of Coca Cola, McDonalds, or even Big Dairy. However, some sneaky scientists were able to study beets and find all about their ability to increase your endurance beyond your wildest dreams.

Saying NO to Busting Records

NO is the abbreviated form of nitric oxide, a key messenger in your body.What exactly is it saying?

It is secreted by the cells lining your blood vessels to relax your arteries and let them open up for more blood to flow.

Eating an antioxidant-rich diet can up your NO flow, but so can nitrate-rich foods- like beets!Your body can naturally convert the nitrates in beets, and other nitrate-rich leafy greens, into nitrites. It’s essentially Viagra that works naturally with no side effects. Well, except for a beet-red tint to your urine. Otherwise it’s completely safe.

Don’t believe me?

Good thing the British Heart Foundation funded a beet juice study where they gave subjects just ½ cup of beet juice a day for 4 weeks. That’s essentially a quick shot of it a day which led to a significant 8 point drop in blood pressure due to an increase in NO.

But how does that help you push past your current personal bests?

It turns out that nitrates not only help deliver more oxygen to your muscles, through relaxing your arteries, but also help your body extract more energy from that oxygen. Terms like more are so vague though.

Let’s put some numbers to that, shall we?

One study looked at freedivers. These athletes have fantastic metabolisms, as mentioned in Upgrade you Breath, the over 22 minute record breath hold is owned by a freediver. Just a shot of beet juice helps free divers hold their breath for a half minute longer than usual.If you’re not used to practicing breathing exercises then right now give it a shot. Take a big gulp of air and clamp your mouth shut, try to hold your breath for time.Now, imagine you’ve trained and spent years increasing that number from one minute, to two, all the way to four. How powerful would it be to have a shot of beet juice to instantly increase your PR by another 30 seconds.

That’s a 125% increase in performance.

In another study, a sip of beet juice helped cyclists perform at the same intensity while consuming 19% less oxygen than the placebo group.

The riders then cranked up the intensity to what the egg-heads call “severe cycling”. Beet drinkers extended the time to exhaustion from 9:43 to 11:15 compared to the placebo controlled group.

This translates into greater endurance with less oxygen.

Which is handy both in competition when you’re looking for that slight edge to bring out your best performance and when you’re leaning into your edges during training.

I like packing things in groups of threes, so just one more study. Runners were fed 1 ½ cups of cooked beets 75 minutes before a 5k race. Just to prove you don’t need a juicer to squeeze all the benefits out of beets. The racers eating cooked beets reported less exertion even though their heart still pumped its hardest.

If you’re trying to increase your endurance, make feats of strength look effortless, or just live as long as you can as well than why aren’t regularly consuming beets.

And there is no easier, economic or sure-fire way to get those highly touted nitrates than Pure Clean Powder, the only organic, nitrate-certified, cold-temperature processed beet juice powder on the market.

It really works. And it works really well. It is truly “Fitness in a Jar”.

Believe it or not, eating the proper amount of the right kind of fat may very well be the key to unlocking your personal health, appearance, and performance potential. A common misconception is that fatty foods cause weight gain. But nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, eating enough healthy, dietary fat can actually help your body burn more pounds of unwanted, body fat. And the good news doesn't stop there! Fueling your body with foods rich in omega-3 fats can:

For many years, fats have been fighting an image problem. Unfortunately, incomplete and incorrect information have given them a bad reputation.

Of course, there are bad fats (those that cause degenerative diseases) that should be avoided. Bad fats include those that have been hydrogenated or refined, and can be damaged by over-heating. But the truth of the matter is that eating too many carbohydrates—especially those in the form of refined white sugars and flours—increases body fat.

If you’re like most health-conscious people, you know that a healthy diet should include plenty of healthy fats. But what exactly are “healthy” fats? How do they from their “unhealthy” counterparts?

One clue will be an overview of how fats behave in temperature. They range from always being a solid at room temperature and stable in heat to only becoming a solid in the freezer and very unstable in heat.

Processed, fabricated fats like;Crisco and saturated margarine remain solid at almost any room temperature and almost never go bad....

Over the next few weeks, I'll be sending you answers to some of the most commonly-asked, Core 4 Nutrition questions. Let's start at the beginning--with question number one!

Question:I eat a healthy and well-balanced diet, so why would I need to take supplements?

Answer:For optimal function, the human body requires a number of different vital nutrients in amounts that are almost impossible to obtain from food sources alone. Of the thousands of initial, base-line, nutrient assessment results we've seen from clients (including those who had been eating a healthy, well-balanced diet for years), very few have fallen within a normal, healthy range. Taking the correct amounts of the right supplements is essential for maximizing the body's full health and performance potential. Still, eating well is an absolute essential...

You train for hours, spend hundreds and thousands of dollars on equipment but if your level of this one powerful substance are not optimal you will not get the benefits of all your hear work and money. I am not talking about a new supplement with fancy packaging or high-end marketing but a substance that our body has relied on for thousands and thousands of years.

The substance is vitamin D. And without optimal levels of vitamin D3, rest assured you are leaving health and performance on the table. It is important to know that Vitamin D really isn’t a vitamin that you get from dairy but rather, a hormone-like substance that your skin manufactures when exposed to the UV-B rays of the sun.

Vitamin D contributes to peak athletic performance by directing the physical processes involved with muscular function, strength and recovery. In addition, it drives physical reaction time, balance and coordination. In order to understand how vitamin D can impact your athletic performance, it’s important to understand that it functions—much like a steroid hormone (due to its highly-anabolic ability to promote growth, repair and recovery)....

If you've been reading my posts, you already know that an optimal vitamin D3 level will strengthen your immune and metabolic systems while improving your muscular performance and recovery capacities.

A recent study published in the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition has shown that vitamin D3 is even more important because it prevents the onset of chronic disease and actually increases the human lifespan. Researchers found that raising serum vitamin D3 levels above 50ng/ml in those who were deficient reduced their disease mortality rate by 20 percent and increased their life expectancy by a full five years.

To put these findings into perspective, consider this: Having a low vitamin D3 level carries the same health and life expectancy risks as smoking a pack of cigarettes every day for 15 years!...